Global firm NashTech migrates CRM from Microsoft Dynamics 365 to HubSpot 

The Challenge

NashTech suffered a disjointed marketing and sales team. The company needed to consolidate their technology stack, and their data into one system. Before the start of the project, NashTech's marketing and CSAT teams were already using HubSpot as their CRM, while their sales team used Microsoft Dynamics 365 (hereafter referred to as Dynamics 365).

Data to be migrated from Dynamics 365 to HubSpot included leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, custom objects housing account data, activities (notes, appointments, email/phone activity), and attachments.

One notable consideration during the migration was how to handle the lead object. In Dynamics 365, the sales process begins with a lead record, and only if qualified, is converted into a contact, company or opportunity.

In HubSpot, the contact is the core record, providing a source of truth for all engagement over time. Lead records are created from the contact record allowing sales teams to gain insight into previous activity. This caveat made data integrity and governance all the more important to the project's success.

Key considerations where data integrity was concerned, included:  

• Maintaining data relationships when migrating to a different lead management architecture. 

• Ensuring that no data was lost when contact records with the same email address were merged during the migration data clean up process. 

• Implementing clear source of truth logic to handle the multiple records versions across the systems (HubSpot marketing data vs Dynamics Sales Data) 

Related: The complete guide to calculating your HubSpot migration ROI

Migration scope & process

The scope of the project was extensive, particularly with regard to the testing of the data to be migrated. 

During the discovery phase of the project SpotDev worked with the NashTech team to identify how and where Dynamics 365 data points should be mapped to within HubSpot. 

Mapping was carried out at an object, property, and data table level. Additional care had to be taken when handling data that required  transformation during the migration process due to the changes to the sales process.

SpotDev’s delivery team also agreed how records, relationships (who’s linked to what) and activities (notes, calls, emails) will be converted, and wrote a QA plan that spells out:

• The acceptance rules 
• Test steps (run a count of contacts in Dynamics, run the same count in HubSpot, compare numbers) and;
• Checkpoints (moments in the project where you stop and decide: “Do we pass and move on, or do we fix problems first?”). 

Under the sandbox testing phase, SpotDev focused on data-level testing to ensure the migration would not impact active marketing/CSAT work. The testing started with configuring a HubSpot sandbox to test the migration with replicated contact and company data (a subset of data) and to validate data mappings and logic determined under the discovery phase.

When marketing and sales aren't aligned because data doesn't sync properly, leads fall through cracks. If poor CRM adoption causes you to miss just 2% of opportunities, on a £10m pipeline, that's £200,000 in lost revenue - SpotDev

Full sandbox user acceptance testing (UAT)

Prior to the full migration into the HubSpot production portal, NashTech asked SpotDev to go beyond initial data testing by creating a fully functional replica of the production portal in the sandbox. This included process automations, record views, and approval workflows, so NashTech’s key users could trial the system end-to-end.

SpotDev completed a full data migration into the configured HubSpot sandbox and led the data UAT, while NashTech led UAT of the sales process.

This work therefore covered both a complete sandbox data migration and full process configuration to support user acceptance testing (UAT).

This extended UAT covered three key actions: 

1. Set up the test environment in HubSpot (the sandbox)
   
   SpotDev configured a sandbox portal to mirror the production system, including:

• Custom record views to see how records look on the screen. 

• Teams & permissions to understand who can see and do what. 

• Pipelines & automations comprising sales stages and automatic actions. 

• Property logic which determines how fields are set up and used. 

• Workflows & active lists which are the automated processes and saved contact groups needed for testing. 

Related: SpotDev's integration simulator: The dangers of DIY integrations

2. Migrate all the data into the sandbox:
   
   SpotDev migrated the full, agreed dataset into the HubSpot sandbox to allow for realistic testing.
   
   
3. Validate the build and run user testing:

• SpotDev completed a full data validation to confirm fields, record counts, and relationships matched expectations.
  
  
• NashTech’s key users then carried out real tasks in the sandbox, reviewing records, checking permissions, progressing deals through pipelines, and verifying automations to ensure the system worked as the business needs.

The Results

Following the successful migration of NashTech’s data from Dyanmics 365 to HubSpot, and onboarding of its sales teams to HubSpot, SpotDev activated hypercare, which served to resolve any post-migration queries, consult on data strategy, migrate additional properties where needed. 

With data successfully migrated, and the applicable properties set up in HubSpot, NashTech has begun using HubSpot to close the gap between marketing and sales with the added delight of exploring all the HubSpot sales AI tools.